DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Lane-sharing is legal in California, or at least officially tolerated, because otherwise they couldn’t have filmed all those awesome two-shots of Ponch and Jon.

I did a fair amount of lane-sharing when I owned a motorbike. I commuted from the City to Oracleville, as I’ve noted previously in a story that’s probably a lot more entertaining than this one will be. And for 10 months I was doing 80 miles a day, to Palo Alto and back. No way I could have survived that drive at the pace of the cagers. I’d still be out there right now, hoping to get home in time for some distant-future dinner.

My mindset when I began lane-sharing was basically, I’m about to be killed. Certainly that felt true for the first couple weeks.

Once I’d gotten more comfortable and a little more skilled, I settled into a more-relaxed mindset: with a little luck, I’ll probably survive.

Yes, most people driving cars are really that bad. I saw a guy eating cereal one time. With milk.

So, when the one driver out of 100 would see me coming and ease his car slightly out of my path, the feeling of gratitude was immense. These few people had granted me a brief reprieve from the near-certainty that I was moments from exercising the “dismemberment” clause of my life insurance policy.

It didn’t take much effort: they checked their rearview, and then adjusted the steering wheel about a half a degree. They’d slide their cars a foot or so away from the edge of the lane, not so much giving me space to pass, but simply telling me they weren’t going to try to clip me if I did.

I always waved as I passed. It was a simple thing, but motorcyclists do it to each other all the time — from the cross-country BMW pilots to the skinny guys sitting six feet in the air on Enduros, I’d get a little wave of solidarity, part shared celebration of the open air, part acknowledgement of survival against considerable odds. It was a friendly and welcoming thing, a gesture of fellowship that I was glad to extend to any cager who had pulled his head out of his tailpipe long enough not to run me over, at least for once.

I liked the feeling of connection across a distributed community, but also I liked the idea that maybe some of those people in cars would pull over for the next biker too, if only to earn another wave. Yeah, it was a tall order, retraining the 600 million drivers on California’s roads, one at a time, but I figured I had 80 miles a day in which to do it.

Fast-forward a bunch of years and a couple of career changes… I haven’t ridden or even owned a motorbike in three years, and I only commute once in a while, but I’m still conscious of all the motorcyclists fighting the good fight between lanes 1 and 2 on the highway. I see them coming, I slide a little further left… but not once has any of them waved at me.

(It’s a lack of foresight, guys, I’m telling you. I must have gotten to at least 10 of the 600 million in my day. You need to pick up where I left off!)

So today I’m trapped in my cage, lamenting my sorry condition (no A/C, no CD, and my standby driving tape is warbling like a vinyl record that got left in the sun) when I see a new commute-time readout above the road, predicting that the remaining few miles to the bridge will consume 27 minutes of my life. I could sense the mass evaporation of attention around me as all the other drivers stared slack-jawed at the sign as if believing they’d misread the number… 27 more minutes?!

Cars that stop being actively driven tend to continue at speed in whatever direction they were already pointing, lane markers be damned, so the biker on the slick new FZ1 who was approaching from behind was no doubt thinking OMGWTFBBQ and wondering if his health insurance would cover full dental reconstruction.

But I’d seen him coming, and I slid over far enough to give him a place to ride for the couple seconds it took everyone else to swerve back between the white lines.

He didn’t wave when he passed, but he nodded in a sort of strangled way. I understood his response. I wouldn’t have taken a hand of the bars either.

Tags: commute, motorbike, lane-sharing, chips
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2008-02-01 13:46:09

It’s been a dismal year for our PV array; after a best-ever January, production has fallen off and stayed down, 20% lower than expected.

At first I thought the low generation was due to dirty panels, so I stepped up my cleaning routine. Then I thought it was due to shading, so we had some more branches trimmed. Neither of these remedies addressed the production shortfall, so finally I resolved to have our installer investigate. I began gathering numbers on our monthly production.

But this takes time, a commodity as rare around here as free electricity. I finally gathered the necessary documentation and submitted it for review in July.

In various dark periods in my past, I have done some customer support work and some system testing work, and I know that the vast majority of technical problems reported by users are their own damn fault. Here is a classic example, from my semester on the graveyard shift in the Mac lab in college about 100 years ago: a thick-necked football player who probably went on to make more money in his first two years out of school than I’ve made ever waved me over to complain that his mouse wasn’t working — when he pushed it forward, the cursor on the screen moved down, and when he pulled it back, the cursor moved up. He’d spent enough time pecking his way through the semester’s various essay assignments to have acquired some mastery of the pointing device, so its apparent misbehavior was discomfiting. Every mouse movement broke his concentration, as he had to consciously override well-established muscle memory to put the cursor where he wanted it. This required so much mental effort that it never occurred to him to pick up the mouse and rotate it 180°. (The cord is supposed to come out of the top, you know.)

So I fully expected to be put off by our installer with inquiries about cleaning, weather, and tree cover, and I was working up solid answers for each in hopes of minimizing the delay of any sane CS agent’s justifiable evasion techniques.

Then I realized that the best way to identify a generation shortfall is not by measuring multiple months’ worth of production data for comparison to previous years or to other systems in the neighborhood… the best way to identify a generation shortfall is to take a spot reading when the system should be maxed out.

My PV array was designed to produce maximum power during the peak hours of the peak season: noon-6pm, May through October. If at 2pm on a bright July afternoon the system wasn’t cranking out 95+% of its rated maximum of 2500 watts, then something must be wrong.

Giving the system every possible advantage, I washed the panels first, then waited for them to dry. The inverter showed a measly 1800 watts. We were missing 28% of our generation capacity.

I sent a brief email to the installer. Within a couple hours I got a reply: someone would be out to inspect the system the next day.

(Tune in next week for Part II)

Tags: solar, debugging
posted to channel: Solar Blog
updated: 2008-02-01 13:55:00

This made me chuckle — day-old, used copies of the new Harry Potter book on sale at Half.com, marked “Read just once!” Thousands of people burned their way through the book’s 759 pages yesterday… and a few dozen of them are trying to recover a bit of the $35 retail price.

I didn’t read the book this weekend, although as a test I timed how long it would take to locate an illegal copy online. The answer: about 15 seconds. It took another minute to pick out the text version; most of them seemed to consist of photographs of the book pages.

But then I bought a copy, the full tree-stump edition, at the local bookstore, which reports having sold 600 of them in the past day and a half. I’d have to guess that makes this their biggest weekend of the year, even at 20% off.

Read more about the rapid devaluation of new media.

Tags: potter, madness
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2007-07-23 12:47:49

Tags: nonsense
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2007-07-19 20:40:46

It’s a Loquat.

Apparently it’s out of season — the fruit is supposed to be ripe in the “late winter or early spring,” not July 1 as in our case.

Speaking of which, while we tried to figure out what sort of tree it is and whether the fruit was any good, most of the fruit has gone bad. The one nice one I could find to show the arborist survived about a half-second past identification, e.g. “Oh, that’s a loquat… <gulp>”

Thanks to the various folks who suggested quince and kumquat: close, but no pie.

Tags: loquat
posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2008-02-01 13:58:51